What shapes local health system actors' thinking and action on social inequalities in health? A meta-ethnography.

ABSTRACT: Local health systems are increasingly tasked to play a more central role in driving action to reduce social inequalities in health. Past experience, however, has demonstrated the challenge of reorienting health system actions towards prevention and the wider determinants of health. In this review, I use meta-ethnographic methods to synthesise findings from eleven qualitative research studies that have examined how ambitions to tackle social inequalities in health take shape within local health systems. The resulting line-of-argument illustrates how such inequalities continue to be problematised in narrow and reductionist ways to fit both with pre-existing conceptions of health, and the institutional practices which shape thinking and action. Instances of health system actors adopting a mor

SUBMITTER: McMahon NE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8801929 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature